HAMMER (AND SICKLE) TIME FOR JAPAN?

By C. B. Liddell

TOKYO, 3 AUGUST 2009 - The high-point of
Communism as an ideology was the early 1930s, before the worst
excesses of Stalinism. At this time not only did Communism
control the vast territory of the Soviet Union, but powerful
Communist movements could be found in many of the major
industrial states, sometimes provoking its antithesis in
Fascism. Even in countries like Britain and America, where mass
support was lacking, Communism held powerful sway among
intellectuals and some members of the elite, providing a ready
source of spies in later years. The fact that Capitalism was
going through a major economic crisis at this time was hardly
coincidental.

Now, with the world facing another significant period of
economic distress, what chance is there for a resurgence of
Communism? In most developed countries, the answer is none at
all. State-sponsored buy outs and economic stimulation packages
designed to get consumerist capitalism up and running again
hardly qualify. But in one vast and extremely important segment
of the world, namely East Asia, Communism is still very much
alive, at least in name. China and North Korea both claim to be
Communist regimes, although with its policies of Sino-centric
national aggrandizement, encouragement of big business, and
growing social inequality, China increasingly looks more like a
traditional Fascist state, while with its brutality, Fuhrer
worship, and concentration camps, North Korea strikes a
remarkably similar chord to Nazi Germany.

Against such a background, the other major East Asian country,
Japan, surprisingly comes closest to the idealized ethos of
Communism, a movement supposedly egalitarian and humanitarian
in nature, but which, in practice, has been behind some of the
worst atrocities in history. While technically a capitalist
country, where the very name "Communist" remains anathema,
postwar Japan has consistently stressed economic planning, full
employment, social cohesion, and avoiding extremes of wealth
and poverty, at least until recently. In addition to this, it
has also maintained the largest Communist party in the
developed World with over 400,000 members and about 7% of the
vote in elections. Moves towards a more liberalized economy by
the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) since the 1990s
combined with the pressures of the economic downturn now mean
that Japanese Communist Party (JCP) is set to do well in the
forthcoming general election to be held this month. But to
Westerners with preconceptions of what a Communist party should
be like, the JCP may offer a few surprises, as this interview
with the party leader Kazuo Shii reveals.

Kazuo Shii

In recent months, Japan has been badly hit by the
credit crunch and recession. What is the party's attitude to
the current economic crisis? What are the solutions?

In the face of the present financial crisis and the economic
downturn, the JCP has made urgent economic proposals. There are
three pillars to our proposals. The first pillar is that we are
seeing casino capitalism, and ordinary people should be
protected from the negative effects of this. In Japan, the cost
of this crisis is being paid by the small and medium-sized
enterprises, and also the workers are suffering as employment
is being destroyed. The second pillar of our position is that
we have to change the character of the Japanese economy from
one that is dependent on foreign demand to one that is based on
internal domestic demand. In order to do this we are calling
for a shift of the economic focus away from one that is
big-business-oriented to one that is people-oriented. In order
to realize this aspiration, we need to do three things: ensure
the stability of employment, improve social welfare, and
improve the agricultural sector. The third pillar is that the
financial crisis we are currently witnessing, which started in
the United States, has been the result of excessive
deregulation. This started in the 1980s and continued through
the 1990s. One of the examples was the repeal of the Glass
Steagall Law. Speculative money has expanded and lots of very
strange derivatives have been prevalent. So in order to
overcome this situation we have to move towards stronger
regulation of the financial market.

From what you've just said, it sounds like the main
problem is the global nature of the economy. You emphasized
that instead of Japan being an exporting country supplying
America, Japanese companies should supply domestic demand more.
Also you've pointed out the problems that arise from this kind
of global capitalism. With Subprime, one problem was that bad
debt could easily be repackaged and sold around the World. So,
would it be true to say that the approach of the JCP is towards
a kind of localism versus globalism, with the emphasis on local
production and local consumption, rather than global exports
and the kind of global market where some countries, like
America act as consumer nations, while others like Japan fulfil
the role of producer nation?

We don't see globalization and localization in terms of an
opposition or confrontation. As regards globalization, it is
inevitable in the capitalist system. For example, Marx wrote in
the 19th century, in the Communist Manifesto that the economy
would be globalized. So we don't endorse anti-globalization.
What we are calling for is democratic or orderly globalization.
This means that the economic sovereignty of each nation should
be respected and that equal and mutually beneficial relations
should be maintained.

So, what you're saying is that globalization has been
too powerful and there has been nothing to balance it, so we
need more local economic sovereignty to balance
globalism.

Yes, like that. The economic sovereignty of each country means
that they will improve or strengthen domestic demand, and by
this, we will be able to make people's livelihoods better than
before. This would be the first priority. Then we would hope to
forge good international trading relationships. The worst point
of the Japanese economy so far is that Japan has been so much
dependent on foreign demand and exports. For the last several
years, the big companies that have depended on exports have
been making vast profits. But, on the other hand, ordinary
Japanese people have seen poverty spreading. This is the
upside-down situation in Japan. This should be overturned.

My very broad impression of the global economic
situation is that America creates all this money or debt, which
is then exported to countries like Japan, while in Japan,
corporations produce all these manufactured goods which are
then exported. To a certain degree, both are unnecessary.
People in the West don't really need more and more gadgets,
while the dollars to pay for them are inherently worthless
because America offers few products or services in
return.

America has a lot of debts and these have been exported to
other countries. For example, Japan bought a lot of national
dollar bonds. These should be returned to the United States. In
order to support this system, Japan's interest rate has always
been very low, almost zero, which is unbelievable in the
capitalist system - a zero interest rate! This is in order to
support the United States, and this shows how subservient Japan
is to the United States economically. This should be corrected.

In recent years, how has the party been doing in
membership terms? I heard that recently quite a lot of young
people have been joining the party, and since the economic
crisis, there must be a lot of renewed interest in the
party.

In recent months, we have been seeing a rise in membership of
around one thousand new members. We now have over 400,000
members. I think, roughly speaking, every strata of society and
every age group is represented in the party. But it is true
that the younger generation - teens, twenties, and thirties -
has been increasing its ratio among our membership. The biggest
reason for this is because there is a very bad employment
situation. Under the neo-liberal economic policy in Japan, 37%
of workers are now non-regular workers. This figure is for all
the workers, but for young people, about 50% are in this
unstable employment situation. Temporary agency workers are
also increasing.

When you have the kind of economic hardship that is
becoming common in Japan, usually it expresses itself
culturally before it expresses itself politically, with the
political reaction coming after some sort of cultural reaction.
Recently the 1929 novel Kanikosen (The Crab Factory
Ship) by the communist writer Takiji Kobayashi, which
describes the extremely harsh conditions on factory ships in
the Sea of Okhotsk, has become a surprise hit, selling over
500,000 copies plus 200,000 in a comic book version. Are there
any other cultural signs of the changing mood of the
country?

For my own part, I was impressed that one of the big commercial
TV stations asked me to appear on one of their programs to
choose some words or phrases from Marx's Das Kapital
to be shown through flip boards. I chose, "After me the
deluge," the slogan of capital. In order to get the profits,
they don't care at all what will happen afterwards. My second
choice was prompted by the subprime crisis: "Excessive credit
gives rise to excessive speculation." My third choice was
Engel's words that nature will be revenged on people through
environmental destruction. This was the first time in Japanese
history that a commercial television station showed such
phrases from Marx and Engels.

Soon there will be a general election, and, of course,
the governing LDP is quite unpopular. Just after they changed
their leader, the economic crisis came along, so they lost the
advantage of holding an election in the so-called "honeymoon
period." If the LDP is defeated in the next election by the
Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ), what do you expect will
happen?

Whether the DPJ will replace the LDP in government or not no
one can say exactly, but what we can say is that the LDP,
politically speaking or organizationally speaking, is at the
last stage of the its lifespan.

Not only do the LDP and the DPJ have a lot in common,
but many of the members have a shared political history. For
example Ichiro Ozawa used to be very important in the LDP. Are
these parties basically offering voters a false
choice?

(Note: Ichiro Ozawa was party leader of the DPJ at the
time of the interview. He resigned in May this year following a
fund-raising scandal and has been replaced by Yukio Hatoyama.
Like Ozawa, Hatoyama was originally a member of the
LDP.)

When I was first elected to the secretariat of the JCP, Ozawa
was Secretary General of the LDP, so it seems to me that there
is no difference between the LDP and the DPJ. A public opinion
poll recently showed a very interesting result. The question
was who do you think would be better as a Prime Minister, Taro
Aso or Ichiro Ozawa? With just these two choices, Ozawa was
slightly more popular, although both of them had almost the
same level of support. However, more than 50% of the
respondents said that neither of them was appropriate. The
reason the JCP is appealing to Japanese voters these days is
because the voters are no longer satisfied with just changing
the faces in politics. They feel that it is also necessary to
change the contents of government as well. This means changing
the system that makes Japanese politics subservient to the
United States, and which gives priority to big business over
the needs of ordinary people. This kind of broad perspective is
only being proposed by the JCP. This is the change that we are
calling for. While I don't expect the JCP to take power, people
are clearly deeply disillusioned by both the LDP and DPJ.

This similarity between the two main parties is a
problem everywhere. In America the Democrats and Republicans,
once in government, act in remarkably similar ways and share
many of the same agendas. In Britain, too, the Conservative and
Labour parties are not so different.

I think we have come to a period in which the world capitalist
system is now seeing its own limitations. I'm always saying
there are three points of limitation. First, they cannot
resolve the poverty problem. Second, they cannot solve the
problem of speculative activity and its results. Third, the
capitalist system cannot solve problems of international
relations. So, looked at in the perspective of the 21st
century, the capitalist system is not capable of leading us
towards a future society. The future society will be based on
the socialist system. This will be inevitable.

Japan has a very serious demographic problem. Not
enough children are being born and the number of old people is
disproportionate, so there's big pressure in some quarters to
increase immigration to Japan for economic reasons. Recently, I
heard there was an agreement between Japan and Indonesia to
facilitate bringing nursing staff from Indonesia to help take
care of Japanese senior citizens.

This problem of not enough children is one of the effects of
the present political and economic system. This should be
solved by taking into account every aspect of the problem - for
example, the employment situation and the welfare problem.
Employment and welfare conditions should be changed so as to
induce an increase in the birth rate of the Japanese people.

C. B. Liddell is a Tokyo-based journalist who writes on
culture for the International Herald Tribune Asahi Shimbun
newspaper. He last wrote on Soccer: The High
Price of Being a Fanfor
Culturekiosque.com.